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The HinduFormer Sarpanch of Manawa holds the Nirmal Gram Puraskar — a national award given for preventing open defecation.
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The official sanitation policy has been uniquely focussed on building toilets. But the connection between good health and using toilets has not yet been made
When the road in front of his house is finally laid, in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh, Ramesh Kumar hopes he will get permission to set up a small shop in a corner of his compound. Another corner will have a temple, as his father wants. To make place for it, Mr. Kumar will have to pull down a structure built five years ago — a toilet that his joint family of 14 has never used.
“I had some money so I spent a few thousands and built it then, but none of us have used it. And now that my father will live with us, it has to go. The front of a house must have a temple, my father says,” Mr. Kumar grumbles.
One of the rare moments of agreement in the heated political campaign that preceded the general election this May was when both Narendra Modi and former Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh announced that toilets were more important than temples in a country where 70 per cent of rural households do not have a toilet (as the 2011 Census shows). Yet, despite the rhetoric, new data shows that Mr. Kumar is no exception — a substantial portion of households with access to toilets are not using them.
Survey findings
Sangita Vyas and Ashish Gupta of the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (r.i.c.e.), led a Sanitation Quality Use Access and Trends (SQUAT) survey in 13 districts of the five States of Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. They chose districts whose change in levels of rural open defecation between the 2001 and 2011 census most closely matched that State’s overall change in that period. The villages were chosen randomly, and infield randomisation techniques were used to choose households. In all, they interviewed 3,613 adults from the same number of households, and collected latrine use data on 26,792 individuals in those households.
They found that a full 40 per cent of households in the sample that had a latrine had at least one person who was still defecating in the open. This number was the highest for Rajasthan (57 per cent) and the lowest for Haryana (35 per cent). In all, over a quarter of men with a toilet and 17 per cent of women with a toilet defecated in the open.
In Mr. Kumar’s village — Manawa in Haswa block of the fertile Fatehpur district, and one of those surveyed — these numbers are particularly believable. In 2008, the village was awarded the Nirmal Gram Puraskar for being completely open defecation free, former sarpanch Dhanno Devi, who collected the award from former President Pratibha Patil, told The Hindu. Yet, dozens of houses, particularly in the “Harijan basti” that lies on the north-western edge of the village, have never received toilets under the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyaan (NBA) scheme meant to deliver toilets to all rural households. “The rest of the village has electricity while the line hasn’t even come to us. It was the same with toilets,” says Jug Raj, a Dalit marginal farmer and labourer who built his family a toilet when his two daughters grew up some years ago. He doesn’t use the toilet himself; it’s for emergencies, he says.
Moreover, dozens of other households that have a toilet, either built through the NBA or from their own money, do not use the toilet. “It is much healthier to go in the open,” small farmer Ram Avatar toldThe Hindu at the village tea shop. “For the new daughter-in-law or for emergencies, you need a toilet. Otherwise, taking a walk in the fresh air is much better for health.”
His views are mirrored by the survey’s findings. Of those who had a toilet but defecated in the open, 74 per cent gave “pleasure, comfort, and convenience” as the reason for this, and another 14 per cent said it was because of “habit, tradition, and because they have always done so.”
Undoubtedly, the majority of people who defecate in the open are not doing it for pleasure; in the survey, of the persons defecating the open, 86 per cent did not have toilets. However, the findings also show that just building toilets without focussing on behaviour change is not going to be enough, the researchers say.
Since India’s sanitation problem has been diagnosed as a lack of access to toilets, the official sanitation policy has been uniquely focussed on building toilets. However, the survey findings also show that the lack of money to build a toilet is not the only thing that is holding rural households back from building toilets; large parts of the population do not seem to have as yet made the association between good health and using toilets.
Stunting in children
This connection between sanitation and child health — stunting in particular — has been forcefully made in the last few years by a significant body of research from Dean Spears and Diane Coffey at r.i.c.e. Mr. Spears, a visiting economist at the Delhi School of Economics, showed for instance that almost all of the difference in the heights of Indian and African children could be explained by nutrient loss on account of open defecation.
Yet, less than a quarter of households with a toilet in the survey said that they had constructed it for health reasons. In Manawa, The Hindu found that “protecting” the “modesty” of their daughters-in-law was the most common reason cited for need for a toilet. Less than half of all households in the survey which did not have a toilet believed that children would be a lot healthier in a village where no one defecated in the open.
As a result, families are unlikely to build a basic toilet that they can afford at their stage of development; across two blocks of Fatehpur, households did not consider building a toilet a priority until they had built themselves a bigger and better house and taken care of other expenses.
This is not true for other developing countries. Bangladesh’s Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) shows that sanitation in Bangladesh has been taken up by the rich and the poor alike, Ms. Vyas said. “In India’s DHS, 21 per cent of households had a dirt floor and no electricity, compared with 52 per cent in Bangladesh in the next year. Clearly, Bangladeshis are poorer,” she said. “But poor Bangladeshis are more likely to use latrines than poor Indians. Of these impoverished Indians (21 per cent of the whole), 84 per cent defecate in the open. In contrast, a mere 28 per cent of the Bangladeshis living in homes with dirt floors and no electricity similarly defecate in the open,” she said.
Building on his “toilets over temples” statement, Mr. Modi had promised during his successful campaign to build a toilet in every Indian house. “People throughout India and around the world are watching optimistically for Mr. Modi to achieve his goal of eliminating open defecation, but to succeed he will have to focus on behaviour change — not construction — and commit to learning and tinkering with new behavioural solutions,” Mr. Spears said.
rukmini.shrinivasan@thehindu.co.in
The battle for toilets and minds - The Hindu
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Satire on India’s need for toilets is in poor taste
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“It’s just a funny video,” she said to me, “You really don’t have to take it so seriously.” But, I had taken umbrage and she couldn’t quite for the life of her figure why, back then. “You’re over-reacting,” said the India-born US professional. I differed. For me, there’s no place for satire when it came to an issue as sensitive as rape. It was outright poor taste. The issue of toilets in India has always been closely associated with women safety and rape and making light of a PM candidate’s attempts to tackle it, was deplorable to say the least.
Social media enthusiasts had deemed it as the ‘funniest video ever’ when John Oliver made a mockery of Indian Politics and particularly Bharatiya Janata Party’s election manifesto.
Oliver dished out ‘witty’ remarks like “Wow! That’s a bold move, coming out as pro-toilet” or “So, who are you gonna vote for? Modi. Why? Because he appeared to me as a hologram and told me he’d give me a toilet,” and for many it was ‘hilariously funny.’ The video went viral and with it the ill-placed sarcasm aimed to belittle Modi’s poll plank. While the lesser-viewed Oliver’s spiel wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously, it surely provided for rather mediocre entertainment. That it became hugely viral espoused the fact that most viewers, much like the non-resident Indian who felt I was over-reacting, completely missed the point.
Satire is associated with verbal onslaughts that don’t quite qualify for penal action but risk being starkly insensitive to culture and gender issues. But then, for Oliver as with an equally-insensitive viewership, the satire was at worst … funny. Oliver and most of his giggly viewership were unaware of the impending risks that half of India’s population — a whopping 1/12th of the world’s — has to face while venturing out in the open at odd hours of the night or early morning for some private time in a wholly unsafe public space.
So, the promise of ‘a toilet in every home’ may not feature on a US politician’s list of poll planks, it is the need of the hour for a country like India where every house does not have a toilet of its own. It’s of little wonder then that Narendra Modi, the then prime ministerial candidate had earlier last year said that ‘Toilets were needed more than temples,’ in a statement that hit the nail on the head.
Recently, when two minor Dalit girls were found hanging from a tree in Badaun District in Uttar Pradesh, the entire nation was horrified and Modi’s concerns vindicated. Reports confirmed that both the girls were raped and injury marks were found on their bodies too. The girls were sisters and abducted by the perpetrators when they were on the way to relieve themselves in the fields. This rape once again highlighted the fact that there is a dearth of public toilets and proper sanitation in India and that, the worst affected with women who were at the highest risk.
The sad fact is this is not a case in isolation. There have been many such cases reported across nation, in the past, when a vulnerable target has been abducted, raped and/or murdered by crime perpetrators when s/he goes to relieve herself in the open fields.
Last year, United Nation released a report suggesting around 53% of India’s population still defecate in the open. And, it is not just rural areas; cities too contribute to this huge percentage highlighted in the UN report.
Having to fear for one’s safety every time a person needs to answer nature’s call should not be a ‘regular’ occurrence. But, in rural areas where one has to go searching for a deserted farms or fields or wait for it to get dark to relive oneself in a nearby jungle, safety is always compromised and the one’s at the highest risk continue being women and children.
Earlier in February 2014, PM Modi, while campaigning in Kolkata, West Bengal, pointed out a worrying fact that only 60% of the schools in West Bengal have toilets for girls. Although West Bengal State Government claimed that 82% of the schools have separate toilets for girls, data acquired from the District Information System for Education (DISE), a central data collection set up of the Ministry of Education, even though the state does have around 74.9% toilets for girls in school, only 59% are functioning.
Concurrently, news reports in January 2013 suggested that 30% of the schools in Gujarat don’t have functional girls’ toilets. But according to the DISE data, 97% of the schools in Gujarat have girls’ toilet and all of them are in functioning condition.
There are several other reasons why immediate attention should be given to sanitation and toilet facilities in India.
The UN report states, “Our research showed that 6-year-olds who had been exposed to India’s sanitation programme during their first year of life were more likely to recognize letters and simple numbers on learning tests than those who were not,” said Dean Spears, lead author of the paper ‘Effects of Early-Life Exposure to Sanitation on Childhood Cognitive Skills’.
The paper studies the effects on childhood cognitive achievement of early life exposure to India’s Total Sanitation Campaign, a national scale government programme that encouraged local governments to build and promote use of inexpensive pit latrines.
“This is important news, the study suggests that low-cost rural sanitation strategies such as India’s Total Sanitation Campaign can support children’s cognitive development,” Spears said.
The study also suggested that open defecation is an important threat to the human capital of developing countries and that a program accessible to countries where sanitation development capacity is lower could improve average cognitive skills.
“Open defecation lies at the root of many development challenges, as poor sanitation and lack of access to toilets impact public health, education and the environment, Manager of the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Project Jaehyang So reportedly said.
In September 2011, UN rapped the USA in a report suggesting the USA does not provide adequate sanitation facilities for the homeless in its country. In an official report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, a top UN investigator said that the United States’ failure to provide homeless persons access to water and sanitary facilities “could … amount to cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment.”
“The United States, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, must ensure that everyone (has access) to sanitation which is safe, hygienic, secure and which provides privacy and ensures dignity. An immediate, interim solution is to ensure access to restroom facilities in public places, including during the night. The long-term solution to homelessness must be to ensure adequate housing.”
In May 2012, in Oregon, a US Jury awarded two workers a compensation of $332 K for not being provided with ‘an on-site toilet.’ The workers who claimed they were forced to urinate in a bucket have been awarded $332,000 after a jury found they were fired for complaining to Oregon regulators about the lack of an onsite toilet. The men performed mechanical work at Portland International Airport.
Reportedly, the Juror said the company’s treatment of the men was ‘definitely despicable.’ The Juror also stated she and other jurors believed that having easy access to a toilet was ‘a basic human right.’
Last year, in August 2013, two women journalists — Nitali Sarmah and Sulakshana Mithi Kachari — from Gauhati filed a PIL asking court to direct government agencies to maintain separate toilets for women in all locations under the Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC).
The Gauhati High Court on basis of this PIL issued notices to the state government, Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) and Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) to respond to the PIL that appealed for adequate arrangements of separate public lavatories or toilets for women in the city.
The two journalists, referring to data accessed through RTI applications, informed the court that there were toilets, constructed by the GMDA and run by Guwahati Naba Udya Society, an NGO, at Machkhowa, Tarun Ram Phukan Park, Nehru Park, State Zoo, Chandmari, Ulubari and Silpukhuri. But there were no separate toilets for women.
When asked through RTI applications, the GMC had informed that there was a toilet inside Fancy Bazar market and at Adabari bus terminus, too, but without separate facility for women.
The situation is no better in the nation’s capital. Reports suggest, in June 2013, there were 5,383 public toilets for 17 million citizens and, of them, there were just 391 toilets earmarked for women.
Rape is a serious issue and, back in India, ensuring a safe and secure toilet is within reach of each and every woman is a gargantuan task. On the importance of toilets, the Prime Minister is on the right track. However, implementation holds the key to ensure safety of women. Each state will need to pull up its socks and ensure the basics are provided. And, this applies to all, even states not ruled by the BJP…UP and Maharashtra for instance.
Now, I’m certain, with the US screaming shrillest of them all on the issue of rapes in India, my point on the need for sensitivity on the subject of toilets in India will be a lot clearer.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.
Satire on India’s need for toilets is in poor taste | Times of India Blogs
